after they had eyed one
another from different tables. She did not much care. But she would at
least have the painful joy of the Brahmin woman's hope, who trusts by
some fresh incantation to secure a blessing, formerly vouchsafed her
by the gods, but which now old-time petitions fail to renew. It seemed
cold-blooded, the entire arrangement, and yet I knew it was not. She
was far braver than I could have been, even to win her caring. But I
understood.

I must have been rough as I took her hand. "Look here," I said. "It's
a desperate game, Natica. You wouldn't have dared to say that to any
other man than me. You've got used to seeing me fag for you. And I'm
going to do it this time, too. But if you weaken, by Heaven, you'll
deserve to lose for good. It's crazy, it's the act of a pair of
paretics, but I'm going to see it through."

She was crying when I left her. "Percy, my dear," she said; then she
began to laugh--that after dinner benedictine laugh of hers. "If there
weren't Jack, that speech of yours just now might make me want to kiss
you."

On the sidewalk I tried to figure out if there had been knockout drops
in the coffee Natica had brewed for me. In any one of the forty-eight
hours ensuing, I might have rung up the Draytons' on the telephone,
and told her that I had come to my senses. But I didn't do anything of
the sort. Instead, I hunted up a newspaper chap I knew, and he put me
next to "Boiler-plate" Hartopp at the Metropole.

The bruiser wasn't as bad sort as I had fancied him. He was an
Englishman all right--a cut below middle class; you could tell that by
the way he clipped his initial h's off and on. I tried the ice at
first--it's always best when you don't know the exact thickness of
your frozen water. The way I tried it was to toss a flower or two at
Maisie Hartopp and her "Jo-Jo" song.

He rose sure enough, and it didn't take me a quarter hour to see that
the pug was really bowled out by the parcel of stage skirts who wore
his name on the Gaiety bills. This made it a warmer game than it might
have been otherwise, but I was in for it now, and I made the date.

No, I didn't mention Natica. Even a broken-to-harness shawl carrier
has a shred of cautious decency about him. But I gabbled lightly about
a certain feminine party who was keen on exemplars of the genuine
thing in the line of the manly art. Whereupon "Boilerplate" acquired a
pouter-pigeon chest, which fairly bulged over the bar railing, and
g